Stanford professor’s folk-singer documentary coming to PBS for Women’s History Month

Singing for Justice – co-directed by Estelle Freedman, professor emerit of history – chronicles the long and joyful life of Faith Petric. It will air on PBS in March.

At next month’s Oscars, the nominees will include A Complete Unknown, a film about a folk singer named Bob Dylan (who is, in fact, something of a known). But March also sees the release of a film about a truly lesser-known folk singer, Faith Petric. She’s the subject of the documentary Singing for Justice, co-directed by a Stanford historian, Estelle Freedman, and a Stanford alum, Christie Herring, MA ’05. The film will be broadcast nationally on PBS for Women’s History Month and will have its debut on KQED, the Bay Area’s public TV station, on March 14 at 8 p.m. It is scheduled to replay on March 15 at 6 p.m. and March 31 at 11 p.m. 

Petric was very much known in the tight-knit Bay Area music community, where she hosted Friday night jam sessions of the San Francisco Folk Music Club at her home for many decades. That is where Estelle Freedman, the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in U.S. History, Emerit, in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S), first encountered her in the 1980s.